


This World is Not Conclusion

by blondsak



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: 2k words of pure angst, Gen, Not an IW fic, missing character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 11:05:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blondsak/pseuds/blondsak
Summary: Rhodey closes his eyes in exasperation, rubs at them for a moment before looking back at Tony. “Nobody is saying you should give up, Tones. But you can’t forget to live, either.”Tony looks away then, resting the back of his head against the wall and staring up into the bright lights of the lab. “I don’t know how to do that. Until Peter’s home, I’m not sure I ever will.”





	This World is Not Conclusion

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was born out of a period of intense grief in my life, and amidst my own questions about how to live after loss. It's not a deathfic per se, but if you're looking for something happy or uplifting, I can't say I recommend reading this.
> 
> Title taken from an Emily Dickinson poem.

The call comes in at exactly 9:18pm. Tony’s down in the labs, sorting through some old notes on the Iron Man suit’s heat shield when his cell starts ringing.

MAY PARKER the device says, and Tony, ever the multitasker, puts her on speaker.

“Hey May, what’s up?” he says as he continues shuffling through his papers.

“ _Tony_ ,” she replies breathlessly, sounding panicked, and Tony stills his movements, heartbeat skyrocketing. “Peter hasn’t come home yet, and he’s not answering my calls. I called MJ but she said he’s not there, and that he wasn't at school. But I saw him leave for school this morning. Please tell me he’s with you.”

“He’s not,” Tony stutters out, “but don’t worry, I’ll find him.”

-

The thing is, Peter doesn’t do things like this. He’s reckless sometimes, but only for good reason - or well, what he thinks are good reasons. But even at his worst, he has never gone completely off the radar. If anything, since May found out about Spider-Man, Peter has been even more diligent in making sure she doesn’t needlessly worry. Tony too, if he’s being honest.

May calls again at 9:25pm, just as Tony is waiting on FRI to share the kid’s wristwatch data. She tells Tony that she found Peter’s cell, turned off and resting at his bedside table. She tells Tony that Peter’s wristwatch, a gift from Tony that’s complete with a location chip and emergency button, is next to it. She tells Tony that the Spider-Man suit is folded up, still under Peter’s bed where he leaves it every night.

FRIDAY interrupts. “Boss, the data from Mr. Parker’s watch and suit show he is not wearing either. The suit was taken off yesterday evening at 10:46pm, and the watch this morning at 7:45am.”

“That’s right before he left for school,” May says over the phone. “Why would he take it off right before leaving the apartment?”

The thing is, Peter doesn’t do things like this. But now he has, and Tony has no idea why.

-

Tony has FRIDAY hack street cameras next. Just as May said, Peter left his apartment building that morning, apparently on his way to school. Tony watches the feed as Peter closes the main building door, looking around in every direction before hiking his backpack higher up and putting his head down, shuffling onwards. Tony’s brow knits; something about the way the kid is holding himself is just off. His hands tap against his thighs nervously as he starts down the block, his head bowed but every so often glancing up suddenly as if startled. Tony watches him walk for five blocks from nine camera angles, heading in the direction of his school.

“What’s wrong, Pete?” Tony mutters to himself just as the kid comes to a corner, only three blocks now from the high school. Instead of continuing on, though, Peter comes to a halt, his head slowly turning as he looks directly at the camera. Tony breath freezes as the kid just stares into the lens for several seconds, as if he knew exactly where the camera would be. 

As if he knew that someone - _Tony_ \- would later be watching it.

Peter bites his lip, turns away and continues around the corner, the feed cutting out.

“FRIDAY, bring up the next camera feed.”

“I’m afraid that is all I can find, Boss. There are no traffic cameras on Kessel Street, and the footage from Midtown’s security cameras do not show him entering the school.”

-

After 32 hours and no leads, May decides to call the police. Tony arrives at the apartment just as three officers are leaving, having interviewed May on Peter’s last known whereabouts and done a cursory search of his room, to no avail. 

May pulls out the Spider-Man suit from where she’d hidden it in the pantry closet. She carefully hands it to Tony, her hands shaking slightly and her eyes rimmed red.

“I want you to have it,” she says, not looking him in the eyes. “For safekeeping. Just until he comes back.”

Tony takes the suit, clenching his fists around the strong and sleek fabric. “Just until he comes back.”

-

James finds Tony still up in the lab, hours after everyone else in the compound had gone to bed. An anonymous tip had come in to the police earlier that day, saying they’d seen a kid resembling the missing Queens kid hanging around outside a gas station in Dover, Delaware. But, as with the dozens of leads before, it had come to nothing. 

Now it was going on three in the morning and Tony was sitting on the floor, back against the wall, a bottle of bourbon next to him. James sighs, coming towards Tony before sliding down the wall to sit next to him. “Tones, man, you need to get some sleep.”

Tony turns to look at James, as if just noticing he’s there. “Why would the kid do this, Rhodey? Why would he just disappear like this? It doesn’t make any fucking _sense_.”

“I don’t know, Tony. We’re not even positive it was a decision he made. He could have been taken, or threatened, or coerced. We just don’t know.”

“You’ve seen the footage, Rhodey. You saw the way he looked at the camera before he walked off the face of the damn earth. He knew what he was doing, and instead of asking me for help with whatever was going on he decided to do this, whatever the fuck _this_ is.”

James sighed before clapping a hand on his friend’s shoulder, the other hand taking the bottle of bourbon from Tony. “I don’t know, Tones. But I do know you can’t keep going on like you have. It’s been weeks.”

“29 days,” Tony muttered. “It’ll be a month on the seventeenth. God, an entire month. Y’know the chances of finding a missing person alive dwindle significantly after only three days? And he’s been gone near a month.”

“You can’t do this to yourself, Tony. We don’t know anything yet. He could be perfectly fine but just hiding. But in the meantime you have to take care of yourself. Think of what Peter would want for you, man. He wouldn’t want you doing _this_ -” James taps the bottle of alcohol for emphasis “- to yourself, that’s for damn sure. You need to take a break, from _all_ of it.”

Tony lips thin as he considers his friend’s words, before shaking his head. “People don’t just disappear, Rhodey. Other people stop looking for them. And I for damn sure won’t give up looking for Peter, not ever.”

Rhodey closes his eyes in exasperation, rubs at them for a moment before looking back at Tony. “Nobody is saying you should give up, Tones. But you can’t forget to live, either.”

Tony looks away then, resting the back of his head against the wall and staring up into the bright lights of the lab. “I don’t know how to do that. Until Peter’s home, I’m not sure I ever will.”

-

Tony Stark has more advanced tech at his fingertips than the whole of almost any nation on earth. He has billions of dollars just waiting to be spent. He has the Avengers, and even the ex-Avengers, at his beck and call. Among his allies he can count enhanced beings, mutants, aliens, kings and even gods.

Yet when Peter turned that corner, he turned right out of Tony’s grasp. Watching the final camera feed again, seeing the way the kid hesitates with something akin to regret - _he wasn’t taken, he wasn’t kidnapped, he knew what he was doing, he had to_ \- as he walks out of his own _(young, happy, beautiful)_ life, Tony can’t help but feel like the most helpless man in the universe.

-

Every lead comes to nothing, and as time passes the tips dwindle and new headlines replace the updates, or lack thereof, on the 17-year-old Midtown student who disappeared into thin air. 

After nearly three months at the compound helping Tony with the search, Rhodey says - not unapologetically - that he has to get back to base and his work. 

“Don’t forget, you still have to live, Tones,” are his parting words at the compound helipad before he leaves. Tony nods his head, unable to bring himself to say anything in response that wouldn’t sound bitter.

Watching one of his only true friends fly off, he thinks that he’s not entirely sure he wants to live. Not when the kid isn’t around to share in it.

-

“I’ve decided to have a funeral,” May tells him over a quiet dinner in Manhattan.

Tony chokes on his trout, as the little bit he managed to eat turning to stone in his stomach. “But May, we don’t know that he’s dead.”

Immediately tears pool in May’s eyes. It was rare she met with Tony and didn’t shed a few tears, these days. “I can’t keep on like this, Tony. I can’t keep wondering if it’s him every time someone knocks on my door, or waking up at night thinking I heard his window open only to find an empty bedroom. I can’t keep losing it every time I think I see his face in a crowd, or when I pass by his school, or when _The Daily Bugle_ posts yet another damn article wondering why Spider-Man abandoned Queens. I can’t keep up the _hope_. It’s just too much. I need to start to grieve.”

Tony grinds his teeth. “I get it, I do. But May, you can’t give up, not yet. I promised you I’d find him, and I will.”

“It’s been over eight months, Tony. Don’t you think if you had the power to find him, you would have by now?”

The words hit Tony like a slap to the face. May brings a hand to her mouth, as though only realizing what she’d just said aloud. “Tony, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean -”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tony says, standing up. “I’m sorry, May, but I should get going. I have a, a meeting I forgot about.”

May stands now too, “Tony -”

“Let me know the cost for the funeral. I’ll pay all the expenses. But I really do have to go.”

That he won’t be attending goes unspoken, but he knows May hears it all the same.

-

A year passes, then two, three. Peter’s 18th birthday comes and goes, then his 19th. His 20th. Tony spends the birthdays with May, but the anniversaries of the disappearance alone. He never stops looking for Peter, but he finds himself less inclined as time passes to head down to the lab devoted to finding the kid, to watch the camera feed yet again for clues, to comb through government databases of new cases featuring unidentified remains, or trafficking rings, or kidnappings. Some days, the hardest ones, he finds himself in the suit flying over the city streets. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s trying to find, but he can’t give up. He won’t.

-

1,168 days after Peter goes missing, May calls him. “Someone found his backpack,” she says breathlessly. 

The police are keeping the bag and contents for now, but it doesn’t take but five minutes for FRIDAY to hack their database and download the evidence photographs and notes. The backpack had been found by a young kid playing on the beach of a lake in New Jersey, over fifty miles from where Peter had last been seen. From the look of it, the bag had been there for years; the once-bright blue color has faded to almost grey, and some of the contents were moldy from being entombed in soggy sand for so long. 

As Tony combs through the photos, nothing strikes him as out of the ordinary. There’s Peter’s wallet, along with his Midtown ID and a few dollars. A few notebooks. An advanced calculus textbook. A gift card for a bodega called Delmar’s that Tony faintly recalls the kid mentioning. 

Tony looks at each photo five separate times, searching for any clues. Surely Peter would have left a note, a message, a recording, _something_ to tell Tony where he was heading or what he was up to. How to be found. But if it’s there, Tony doesn’t see it.

That night, for the first time in years, Tony trashes one of his old labs. He smashes glass and topples tables, and afterwards he sits down in the one chair not overturned. He lowers his head in his hands, and cries harder and longer for everything he’s lost and can’t find than he ever has before.

-

Tony arrives at the beach near dusk. The lake is located in a state park, and just as he’d hoped, nobody’s there when he lands gently on the ground in the suit. He’d come out here to do reconnaissance, but looking around Tony can’t help but feel it’s a useless endeavor. There’s no way of knowing how the backpack came to be buried here, or by whom. If Peter ever was here, it would have been years ago. 

And if he’s somehow still here, well. 

Tony exits the suit and sits down on the beach, letting the sound of the waves wash over him.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry I didn’t find you. I failed you.”

The wind carries the words away.

-

Somewhere out there, there’s a kid with curly brown hair and gangly limbs. A kid who loves physics, Star Wars and collector Lego kits. A kid who isn’t just a kid, but a hero with a heart so big he saves complete strangers from anything he can, no matter how small or big, no matter how easy or dangerous. A kid who left for school one morning and never came home.

Tony hopes wherever that kid is, he’s safe. That he knows he’s still loved, and still missed. That he should never have had to face this, any of it, by himself.

1,170 days after Peter Parker turned that final corner and walked out of his own life, Tony Stark decides it’s time to start living again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Because (I Could Not Stop for Death)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19310602) by [seekrest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekrest/pseuds/seekrest)
  * [Wait for Me (to Come Home)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19734643) by [seekrest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekrest/pseuds/seekrest)




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